This week is yet another Nazi week on the American Heroes Channel. On Sunday night, AHC broadcasted an episode of Myth Hunters on the “Nazi Hunt for Atlantis” (S02E07), which indicated its intention to examine Nazi efforts to seek out the Aryan master race from Atlantis. Then last night they offered up a new special, Hitler’s Jurassic Zoo, which was advertised as a look into Nazi efforts to create a prehistoric game preserve. Neither show was what it seemed to be. I was genuinely surprised, given its ridiculous title, that Hitler’s Jurassic Zoo was by far the superior offering.

“The Nazi Hunt for Atlantis” opens with Himmler’s desire to use the continent of Atlantis to help prove the superiority of the human race; however, the Atlantis that the narrator describes as being from legend is not the Atlantis of Plato. The narrator speaks of an Atlantis that “dominated” all other “races” and had colonies in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. This is not the Classical Atlantis but rather the Atlantis of Ignatius Donnelly and Helena Blavatsky and their Continental counterparts, who made the two specific claims not found in Plato: that Atlantis had colonies in Africa and America and that the Atlanteans dominated other races as a master race. The map the show uses is based on Donnelly’s classic map from Atlantis: The Antediluvian World.

Donnelly's map of Atlantis.

Himmler believed that the Atlanteans were the mother culture of all later cultures, and therefore all cultures relate back to the original supermen, the Aryans: “Racism impregnates the Atlantis myth,” Himmler’s Crusade author Chris Hale says. “It’s about a superior race of beings who spread this knowledge around the world.” The show fails to note that this racism comes in with Ignatius Donnelly, who made the Atlanteans explicitly white and Aryan. Even Helena Blavatsky didn’t do that. Her Atlanteans were Mongoloid in feature and gave rise to Native Americans and East Asians. It is Donnelly’s lily white master race, not any text from Plato, that Hale notices and which finds parallels in Continental Atlantis race theories of the same era. Prof. Michael Lynch of the University of Edinburgh also appears in the show to discuss the connection between racism and Atlantis. According to the show, Himmler charges explorer Ernst Schäfer with finding evidence of the Aryan master race from Atlantis, which Himmler believed lived on in isolation somewhere in the most remote regions of Tibet. Himmler and his research organization, the Ahnenerbe, believed that the discovery of “Aryan supermen” in Tibet would validate Nazi race theories, which are not discussed in any depth. Schäfer disagrees with Himmler’s Atlantis theories, but goes along with the offer to secure funding for an expedition to Tibet. Like all episodes of Myth Hunters, the show has very little by way of analysis and instead take a straightforward approach to retelling the story of Schäfer’s efforts to conduct science during his 1938-1939 Tibet mission amidst a government and a culture that has rejected science in favor of myth. All of this is more or less a distillation of Hale’s Himmler’s Crusade, and if you’ve read the book, there is nothing new here. The show, however, does a good job highlighting the political aspects of the Tibet expedition, particularly the way the Nazi propaganda efforts caused tension with Great Britain, which controlled access to Tibet via India, and how the expedition went forward because of British efforts to get on Hitler’s good side, but not without a wary eye watching their progress from the Raj. But at this point, Atlantis is a bit of an afterthought, and the show instead focuses on the expedition’s efforts to grade northern Indians and Tibetans on a racial scale to rate their level of Northern European traits, but the expedition members found Himmler’s Atlantis ideas laughable. The Tibetans were particularly pleased that the Nazis shared the swastika with them (it was an ancient symbol in Tibet), and they welcomed the Nazi with unprecedented access to the country and its capital. At the end of the expedition, the team returns to Germany and the warm embrace of Himmler, despite the lack of evidence for Atlanteans in Tibet. The program dutifully follows through with an epilogue about the downfall of the Nazis (Schäfer ended up managing a wildlife preserve with ex-Nazis in South America), but the facts-only approach to the show was a bit of a missed opportunity to have a more serious discussion of the consequences of pseudoscience. All throughout the show, AHC ran promos for their “special” presentation for the week, last night’s Hitler’s Jurassic Zoo. How could I resist a show about Nazis and DINOSAURS? We’ve had Nazis and Atlantis, Nazis and the Holy Grail, Nazis and UFOs, and Nazis and time travel; but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen one about Nazis and dinosaurs. Now if you asked me before I watched the show whether one on Atlantis or one on prehistoric animals would be a deeper and more sensitive exploration of Nazi racial madness, I would have guessed wrong. “Only now can the full story be told…” says the narrator to open the story of, well, not dinosaurs after all. Sadly, the “Jurassic” title was a bait-and-switch, including the clever but disturbing main title sequence, which riffs on the classic typeface of Jurassic Park and the massive gate that serves as the movie park’s entrance. Instead, the Nazis wanted to recreate extinct mammals that the original Aryans would have hunted in the mythic past. It’s not quite as interesting as dinosaurs, but you take what you can get. Also: There isn’t very much Hitler in the show, and the concept of “zoo” is rather loosely defined as well. Immediately, though, this documentary differentiates itself from Myth Hunters. It starts with an account of Nazi atrocities in 1941in the Białowieża Forest area of what had once been eastern Poland (then Nazi-occupied Greater Germany), along with the documents that show the premeditated nature of the actions, including the orders for the atrocities and photographs of pre-war models for what the Nazis pre-planned for the site. These atrocities—deportations and exterminations—were designed and imposed by Hermann Göring in order to take over the forest as a nature preserve for the Nazi elite, for it was home to some of the last large populations of the wild animals of eastern Europe. Before the war, Göring already had a model of the preserve built. Steve Jones of the University College London discusses the importance of Tacitus’s account of pure Germans, and we hear of the Teutonic myths that shaped the Germanic vision of the forest primeval and its role in German culture. I was quite impressed by the seriousness of purpose in what the title implied would be a flippant documentary, and the way the show connected Nazi actions both to the mythic conception of the Volk and to the pseudoscience of its time. A zoologist named Herr Prof. Dr. Lutz Heck was “entranced” with “romantic myths” of the great beasts fought by the mythic Germanic heroes, particularly the auroch—an ancient and gigantic bovine that went extinct in 1627, and wanted develop a program to breed new aurochs. Heck and his brother had been trying to breed lookalike aurochs from modern cattle since the 1920s (before the Nazi era) by selecting from modern cattle the traits that best resemble the auroch. The auroch was the ancestor of modern cattle, and the Hecks believed that they could reassemble the auroch from the traits they bequeathed to their descendants. Here there is a connection to Nazi race theory, for the Hecks’ efforts to purify cattle blood reflects the emphasis on racial purity in Nazi race laws, and the show does not shy away from highlighting the clear connection between efforts to recreate prehistoric (and mythic) purity at the animal and human levels. Lutz Heck threw his lot in with the Nazis, and he courted Göring’s favor by supplying him with lion cubs for pets and going out on spear-hunting expeditions with him. Both the Hecks and Göring share a cult of masculinity that demands the strongest and wildest creatures as the only worthy subjects of Nazi master-hunters. To that end, the Hecks want to recreate “German beasts,” and to that end they star back-breeding (supposed) wild horses from tame modern horses, and they import vigorous animals from the Americas to revitalize the breeding stock. Their efforts at animal eugenics parallel Hitler’s eugenics program and its effort to perfect the Aryan race. Excerpts from Mein Kampf are used to make this connection, and the corruption of science in the name of mythology and ideology is emphasized with chilling efficiency. The show carefully parallels the Nazis’ treatment of Jews with that of animals, and how the mythology and ideology of hunting and husbandry governed both. The Jews, though, ranked below muscular “Germanic beasts,” for they were unworthy even to hunt; in a carefully chosen detail, the show notes that in the same forest where the aurochs were being recreated as worthy adversaries, Jews were fed to German Shepherds, a “Germanic” dog. As World War II began, Heck used his connection with Göring to obtain zoo animals from occupied countries to breed and then hunt and kill. The director of a zoo in Poland hid Jews in the basement while Heck visited the house above and seized the zoo’s best animals. In order to make Białowieża into a prehistoric animal sanctuary, Göring asks Himmler to ethnically cleanse the forest. More than 20,000 locals were expelled, and this effort marks one of the first episodes in the Final Solution. All of the forest’s Jews were removed, and some killed. Dr. Philip Blood tells us that Białowieża was the first area the SS declared “Jew-free,” and this occurred in the name of a myth, taken from Caesar and Tacitus, of manly “bare-chested Germans” hunting aurochs with spears. I was impressed by the repeated connection the show’s experts draw between fringe history—an obsession with myth as reality—and the consequences of these myths. The neo-aurochs were released along with bears and bison to make Białowieża into a Germanic forest, even as SS officers hunted down and killed any Jews and opponents of the Nazis who infiltrated the forest. The troops celebrated their kills with beer and “cozy get-togethers.” Blood says that the Soviets killed the Germanic cattle in the Białowieża forest after the War, ending the Nazi effort to resurrect the primeval world of myth. Some of their cows live on as today’s Heck Cattle, though they are not, obviously, true aurochs, but rather a large breed of modern cows. The Hecks lived happily ever after as zoologists, exonerated after the War. Jones tells us that it’s easy to fool yourself into believing a myth, or that you have the key to unlocking the past. But just as Heck Cattle are not aurochs, and the mythic past can’t be reopened. He also notes that the Nazi breeding programs and eugenics efforts tainted genetic research for decades. The Heck Cattle, like the Volkswagen Beetle, stand as modern reminders of the Nazi regime hidden in plain sight.

I should of watched both of those shows instead of watching the Russian Yeti doc.

At least AHC re-airs constantly.

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bkd

6/3/2014 06:25:34 am

Why don't they just film a Delta Green movie already. You know they want to.

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Eadweard Muybridge

6/3/2014 06:51:51 am

They're doing the sequel to Titanic first

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.

6/4/2014 01:34:44 am

they semi~borrowed the idea from DINO D-DAY?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxxW39P9af8

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Lynn Brant

6/4/2014 02:04:35 am

Some people are so obsessed with race. Can't be good.

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A.C.

6/4/2014 02:40:34 am

Why is the Third World co-called?
Because there are inferior races with inferior cultures not as advanced as Western Civilization - of course the Baltic countries don't count because they are so backward - they still have outside lavatories with buckets and horses and carts in the streets - and the people don't want to live there that's why they join the European Union to emigrate to the advanced cultures and advanced countries - countries with supermarkets and hot flowing water from the taps

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Matt Mc

6/4/2014 05:09:47 am

Now I know that the cold war is over but wouldn't the Baltic states be considered second world?

Anyway having traveled all over the world I can honestly say most people are very happy and pleased with where they live even if they do not have "western comforts". Hell I know quite a few people in South Asia that think we Westerns are inferior because we complicate our lives and no longer are in contact with our environment. Who is inferior or superior is all subjective, bottom line is we are all humans and we all deserve the same amount of respect no matter where we live or what the conditions are.

A.C.

6/4/2014 05:14:45 am

Immigrants from the Baltic countries openly admit they came from a crap country

Matt Mc

6/4/2014 05:20:12 am

so that makes them lesser people?

A.C.

6/4/2014 05:24:45 am

It makes the Baltic countries an inferior world

A.C.

6/4/2014 05:29:15 am

And what makes matter worse those immigrants from the Baltic countries choke up the working class labour market because the employers exploit them in a way they would never do to their own nationals, and the nationals find themselves out of work

This is not "progress" - it's regression back to centuries ago.

Matt Mc

6/4/2014 05:31:25 am

so infrastructure and connivence dictate superiority?

Interesting. Sounds like a very privileged and close minded line of thinking

Of course the immigrants are grateful and very happy that they have found work, even being exploited.

Perhaps you should ask the nationals who have lost work, or cannot find work, because of the immigrants.

This doesn't affect the middle classes in society. And the middle classes in the Baltic countries don't need to emigrate.

Matt Mc

6/4/2014 05:54:05 am

oh they are not immigrants they still live in Latvia

A. C.

6/4/2014 06:06:32 am

It's an acute situation. The introduction of temporary contracts for the working classes, replacing permanent positions, exists everywhere. There are workplaces where Health and Safety doesn't exist anymore. And how is this going to be solved? What is to become of the working classes in the future? The exploitation of the immigrants is only part of the problem. Politicians cannot be relied upon or trusted when it comes to the welfare of working people at the bottom scale of society. Not anymore.

Matt Mc

6/4/2014 06:16:02 am

Okay my friend Krystops just got back to me and said that while things got a bit rough between 2008-2010 Latvia's is experiencing one of the fastest economic growth in the EU. He says overall since his family moved back to Latvia after the fall of the Soviet Union the quality of life for the average person has been improving. He himself just purchased a coffeehouse in downtown RIga and has seen great business in the past years since he started the business and it is improving monthly with other people his age (40) also purchasing businesses in the downtown area. He says a lot of people who had to flee the country during the cold war are still returning and starting businesses which is encourage a great national pride and growth. He says while people still struggle in the country overall they are happy and encouraged by the countries growth and gaining reputation within the international market. He says they still have a long way to go but everyone remembers very well how hard it was living under communist rule so they all see it as moving forward.

He does not agree at all the people who live in the Baltic region live in an inferior world he says everyone feels that world was left behind them once the Soviet Union fell.

A. C.

6/4/2014 06:22:26 am

There are Latvian immigrants everywhere. Why do they choose to emigrate if it's so nice and cosey in Latvia like your friends claim.

A. C.

6/4/2014 06:27:01 am

Open a coffeehouse. All you need is money. Become a business entrepreneur. Work your way out of poverty. It's simple.

Matt Mc

6/4/2014 06:28:44 am

My point is using the term "inferior" is in correct, and prejudicial. in fact Krystop's said it must of been some American making that statement in not so kind words. As he told me things can be tough but it is improving over the years and continues to do so. He choose to return to his homeland and raise his children after his family was exiled for years and is proud of his country and along with many others is working to improve the country for the next generation and he takes great pride in that.

Now the quality of life might not be the same as it is in the US or UK but to call it inferior is wrong, it is different but that does not mean that people who live there are lesser people or the location itself is lesser than any other.

A.C.

6/4/2014 05:39:21 am

Dilute the workplace with immigrants, exploit them in the process, keep the nationals in the workplace to a minimum - or better still have no nationals working in the workplace at all. That's what's happening now in many countries. And what for? There is only one answer,

Regression to how things were like before the Industrial Revolution.

And it's going to get a lot worse. We already had the underclasses before immigration.

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Varika

6/4/2014 09:20:38 am

Things before the Industrial Revolution were in many ways MUCH MUCH better than things shortly after the Industrial Revolution began.

By the way, "First world" and "third world" are no longer considered appropriate terms. It's "developed" vs. "less developed" now. Which is at least honest in the fact that it judges you based on how many toys you have.

It's also not regression when it's a problem that has NEVER STOPPED. Or did you not realize that the cry "Immigrants are taking our jobs!" came along with the Industrial Revolution, too? Not that the locals would DO the jobs the immigrants are taking, or those jobs would already be full when the immigrants arrived.

I have a word I like to use for attitudes like yours: "useless." Your attitude is entirely useless. It doesn't move you to DO anything, it just lets YOU feel superior because you "see the problem" (that isn't really a problem at all). It's all about your bigotry.

Sorry you can't make enough of yourself to not have to feel so inferior.

An Over-Educated Grunt

6/4/2014 01:31:16 pm

Have to agree with Matt Mc and Varika here. Your attitude only makes sense if you're also going to wear a monocle and complain about those blasted suffragettes.

For that matter, you realize that migrant labor has been a crisis in many climes and places, right? It's not simply post-industrial. Edward III of England tried to enforce serfdom in the 1350s; the Romans had their infinite border crises in both East and West; the Great Wall could be interpreted as a giant "IMMIGRANTS NOT WELCOME!" sign.

A.C.

6/5/2014 07:02:14 am

People rambling on and on about Latvians opening coffee houses and situations after the Cold War is pure off topic.

This has nothing to do with the exploitation of immigrants taking the jobs of nationals.

And the comments by Varika and An Over-Educated Grunt are made by those who just simply don't know what/s going on, what's happening in plain sight all over Europe

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A. C.

6/5/2014 07:04:35 am

The immigrants from the Baltic countries do themselves consider their own countries are inferior, that's the reason for their emigration.

Tell them they are wrong.

Don't try it on with people like me.,

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A. C.

6/5/2014 07:18:33 am

There are employers in Western Europe who pay the travelling expenses of those from the Baltic countries to come to work for them and reject employing their own nationals. These Baltic immigrants rent houses where 6-8 of them share the costs. None of these facts are publicised in the media - probably because newspapers and television companies are doing similar things with immigrants.

The Baltic immigrants get jobs in Western countries before they even leave their respective countries. Every job vacancy in Western Europe is advertised in the Baltic countries. Deals are brokered between employer and Baltic country applicants before they even leave their respective countries.

None of this information is publicised.

Matt Mc

6/5/2014 08:03:08 am

I am used to people making ignorant statements on the internet but seldom do I think the author of those statements is truly ignorant I think these might of changed my mind.

A.C. I feel sorry for you, you really need to open your mind and get past your hatred. The world is a large place full of interesting and intelligent people who all deserve to be respected. I hope one day you realize that your sense self-privilege hurts both yourself and those around you.

Please look inside yourself and ask yourself what drives the ignorance that lies within because even one person with thoughts like yours hurts the whole of us.

Matt Mc

6/5/2014 08:19:16 am

Another fact - an immigrant could work in a Western country for a period of time, feel homesick, return to his country for several months, then emigrate back to the West and find automatic employment solely on the basis of being an immigrant

The real Matt Mc

6/5/2014 08:26:35 am

That post from 3:18 was not from me.

I hope A.C. and others like him will one day realize that their manner of thinking is the problem and not the other way around.

An Over-Educated Grunt

6/5/2014 07:51:13 am

Sweetheart, I grew up in Texas. You whining about immigration is old news to me.

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A. C.

6/5/2014 08:17:03 am

Then don't blame nationals for being unemployed and admit that racism exists in different levels and that inferior countries are a plain open fact - as outlined by the facts that I have provided

An Over-Educated Grunt

6/5/2014 08:26:08 am

That's idiotic. The United States is a Great Power today not because it was destined to be so, but because Winfield Scott was an eccentric genius who happened to have an exceptionally talented staff. Without that accident of timing, Mexico would be the Great Power of North America. I can look at the Mexican War and say that but for Winfield Scott, we'd speak Spanish west of the Mississippi.

For that matter, using your Latvian example, there are precious few native Balts left in ANY of the Baltic countries. They've been settled by Scandinavians, Poles, Germans, and Russians. So - if you truly believe that inferior countries and races exist, please, explain to me how Germany is a failed state? Or Sweden?

Matt Mc

6/5/2014 08:29:18 am

I will admit that people who use a thought process like yours make us all look inferior. If you and people who think like you are examples of what people in "superior" countries are to be like we all are in trouble.

A. C.

6/5/2014 07:35:57 am

I should also add that while employers demand an above average education in applying for their vacancies, they lack all scruples in hiring immigrants that don't even have a second language. These immigrants use sign-language in supermarkets and Tobacconists when doing their shopping.